My partner’s father, Jeff Skelley, who has died aged 96, spent his lifetime as a communist campaigner. A self-taught man, in conversation he combined political insight with deep cultural understanding.
Jeff was born in Westminster, central London, to Lillian (nee Jenkins), a seamstress, and Francis, a trade unionist. He went to school locally, where he excelled at sports, becoming a national junior champion in the 100 metres sprint. As a 15-year-old he travelled to Germany, where he happened to meet some members of the Hitler Youth in a hostel. The encounter alarmed him so much that he decided to join the Communist party of Great Britain.
During the second world war he served as a despatch rider, and after being demobbed he took on the role of Communist party organiser in the East End of London, helping to fight evictions, redundancies and other iniquities suffered by the local population.
In the summer of 1955 he led a party of teenage boys and girls to spend the summer holidays in a socialist youth camp in Czechoslovakia and it was there that he met his future wife, Eva Kosková. It took the next two years before Eva was allowed to leave the country and they married in 1957.
By the late 1970s Jeff was the managing director of the communist publishers Lawrence and Wishart, where he oversaw production of the English edition of the Marx and Engels Collected Works from the originals held in Moscow. There was a storm over Volume 14 and Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, a piece of writing perceived as controversial by some guardians of the canon. There were arguments for an omission, but Jeff would not compromise and, fittingly for a collected works, the whole oeuvre was published.
In retirement Jeff befriended several artists, including Peter de Francia, with whom he was often seen to be debating fiercely about the state of modern art.
In his last decade he became great friends with the painter Timothy Hyman, and he was deeply moved when Tim decided to dedicate his book, Figurative Art in the 20th Century, which is due out this autumn, to him and Eva.
Jeff is survived by Eva, by their daughter, Dana, and by a grandson, Sam.
